I’m a huge nerd for words but when I found out that the United Nations designated today as World Poetry Day I thought, “Wow. I love poetry but that sounds super lame.” I brought it up with my editor and he said, “Sounds boring.” I know! But what if I found someone who could make it sound like it isn’t the worst?So I called Toronto’s Poet Laureate, George Elliott Clarke. I saw him speak a few years back in Halifax and instead of talking about his poems he mostly talked about racism in New Brunswick and how the first law put on its books was a law against having sex with sheep. Being a New Brunswick ex-pat myself, he quickly won me over. I figured he would be able to defend World Poetry Day, no problem. Turns out he’d never heard of it either but after a little research he was quick to defend it.VICE: I think the concept of World Poetry Day is funny because no other art form needs a day for recognition. It’s not like we have a World Music Day or a World Sculpture Day. Do you think that World Poetry Day says something about the public’s general disinterest in the form?
George Elliott Clarke: I don’t think we have World Poetry Day because people don’t pay enough attention to poetry, I think we have World Poetry Day because international elites, especially those who consider themselves to be artists, intellectuals, and humanitarians in general believe that poetry is a particularly humanizing art—so that’s why we need to have it recognized. It’s rooted in what distinguishes us immediately from other animals and that is our language: our ability to connect to the world or describe the world with abstract symbols that animals seem to lack the ability to do. Also, poetry is probably the most democratic art.For poetry all you need is a brain. That’s all.Do you think the general public cares about poetry, though? It’s not like books of poems are selling widely.
If someone believes that poetry is about rhyming, or for that matter non-rhyming linguistic constructs or sets of words, to put it very simply, that are enshrined in books, that are recognized by critics and this is what constitutes poetry then he or she may feel that poetry is in a state of paralysis or decline. Fears that poetry is going to disappear because a paper book might become less prominent as a way of receiving it or as a way of seeing it or reading it, maybe it will be replaced by ebooks or electronics or some sort or another. But even that will not prevent some kid spontaneously composing a poem from his or her own head and reciting it to an audience somewhere.That’s optimistic. Do you consider yourself a purist?
No. I’m not. Human beings by nature are impure in every way. If we want to talk about purity in terms of culture or in terms of race or in terms of DNA or lineages… there is none. People have been mixing all over. From the moment that homosapiens appeared on the planet they were conquering, raping, making love, falling in love, having babies left right and center of every kind of shade, shape, nationality, language group, etc. So there is no purity in human beings. Even the English language isn’t pure and it never was. It was a mish-mash of tongues. I think if you want to be a purist, be a dictator. If you want to be a dictator you can be a purist. You have to be because you gotta know who belongs in your state and who doesn’t. Who belongs in your canon and who doesn’t. I think that as I suggested before the nature of poetry is essentially democratic. I think you want to be pure in heart if you quote scripture. But pure in poetry? Probably not.What makes a bad poem?
If your poem is overly emphasizing effect, as opposed to feeling, you’re probably in danger of writing a bad poem. And this is something I do think the Modernists are partly responsible for. The Modernists suggest you can divorce feeling from poetry because they’re trying to get away from all the bad poetry that was written in the wake of Romanticism. Everybody thought that if they wrote about crying a lot and how much they missed their dead dog then that wouldn’t be a good poem. And the Modernists came along and said, “No, no, that’s terrible poetry. We don’t want to hear about your tears. Stop yer cryin. Dry your tears, shut up.” But in some ways that also became an over reaction to the point where you ended up with a lot of arid poems where no feelings were expressed. They were just word games and in a sense those are bad poems too.
What about a good poem?
A good poem is one where all the emotion, the thought, and the technique are all working in harmony together. And that the poem—no matter how long it is—is a compact expression of thoughtful emotion. Somewhere in the poem there is a connection to somebody who has a head and somebody who has a heart. Somewhere in that poem, no matter how ornate it may be, no matter how intellectually challenging or difficult it may be, there should be somewhere in that poem the idea of a heart and the idea of a voice and a brain.What is most important in poetry?
One of the other problems of the modernist and the post-modernist era, with the exception of the Beats, is that nobody wants to read poetry out loud, especially in school. Why read it quiet? That is the death of poetry. You want to kill poetry? Keep reading it silently. That kills it. You want poetry to live? You gotta read it aloud because it’s meant to be read aloud.Good poems are the ones that you can read aloud. Bad poems are the ones that you can’t read aloud. I’m not talking about concrete poetry, I’m talking about poetry that you should read aloud but you can’t because it’s not constructed well enough to be read aloud. Poetry is oratory, it’s a rhetorical performance, nothing wrong with that. And when you put together an artful construction of words that you mean to have read aloud, you are moving in the direction of oratory and rhetoric. You’re moving in the direction of great speakers.Do any great speakers come to mind?
You’re moving in the direction of the Gettysburg address and, “I have a dream,” and even Barack Obama back in 2008 on the campaign trail, he had some doozies of speeches. Wow. Made everybody cry they were so good. I wonder how well the current Prime Minister could recite a poem. Or recite lines of poetry. Or identify lines of poetry if they were thrown at him. I think that if we want to talk about death of poetry or decline of poetic consciousness, if there is such a thing, I would blame politicians. I would blame public speakers for not being steeped well enough in the history of rhetoric and oratory which is partly a history of poetry. You want to move the public to accept your point of view to accept your policies, to agree with your policies, you damn well better be able to speak some poetry to them. Because that’s what’s going to get them through the bad days. When you have a society of leaders who do not know poetry and cannot speak poetry, you have an impoverished society. You also have a less humane society.Yeah, Harper is a bit of a robot.
I mean I can go on and go on and go on but I really think that if you really want to talk about decline, it’s in the educated ability of our leaders to speak to us in compelling terms. Not in the terms, “Roll up the rim,” or in the terms of, “I’m gonna go see the hockey game,” not to say there isn’t poetry in hockey and there isn’t poetry in coffee and donuts, of course there is, but what I am trying to say is that sometimes you gotta elevate your speech a little bit. I mean elevate it in terms of trying to frame it in eternal terms, which are the terms of poetry. Every good poem wants to last forever, that’s the game. You want to talk about a good poem? A good poem is trying to last forever. It wants to be read by your grandchildren, your great-grandchildren, it wants to be read in all different kinds of languages too. That’s what a good poem wants, a good poem wants to be around when you’re not around anymore. A bad poem is dead before you are.More readings on reading:Barf: “I Am My Own Betrayal”Scott McClanahan’s Animal MagnetismI Tripped With Allah and Wrote a Book About It
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George Elliott Clarke: I don’t think we have World Poetry Day because people don’t pay enough attention to poetry, I think we have World Poetry Day because international elites, especially those who consider themselves to be artists, intellectuals, and humanitarians in general believe that poetry is a particularly humanizing art—so that’s why we need to have it recognized. It’s rooted in what distinguishes us immediately from other animals and that is our language: our ability to connect to the world or describe the world with abstract symbols that animals seem to lack the ability to do. Also, poetry is probably the most democratic art.For poetry all you need is a brain. That’s all.Do you think the general public cares about poetry, though? It’s not like books of poems are selling widely.
If someone believes that poetry is about rhyming, or for that matter non-rhyming linguistic constructs or sets of words, to put it very simply, that are enshrined in books, that are recognized by critics and this is what constitutes poetry then he or she may feel that poetry is in a state of paralysis or decline. Fears that poetry is going to disappear because a paper book might become less prominent as a way of receiving it or as a way of seeing it or reading it, maybe it will be replaced by ebooks or electronics or some sort or another. But even that will not prevent some kid spontaneously composing a poem from his or her own head and reciting it to an audience somewhere.
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No. I’m not. Human beings by nature are impure in every way. If we want to talk about purity in terms of culture or in terms of race or in terms of DNA or lineages… there is none. People have been mixing all over. From the moment that homosapiens appeared on the planet they were conquering, raping, making love, falling in love, having babies left right and center of every kind of shade, shape, nationality, language group, etc. So there is no purity in human beings. Even the English language isn’t pure and it never was. It was a mish-mash of tongues. I think if you want to be a purist, be a dictator. If you want to be a dictator you can be a purist. You have to be because you gotta know who belongs in your state and who doesn’t. Who belongs in your canon and who doesn’t. I think that as I suggested before the nature of poetry is essentially democratic. I think you want to be pure in heart if you quote scripture. But pure in poetry? Probably not.What makes a bad poem?
If your poem is overly emphasizing effect, as opposed to feeling, you’re probably in danger of writing a bad poem. And this is something I do think the Modernists are partly responsible for. The Modernists suggest you can divorce feeling from poetry because they’re trying to get away from all the bad poetry that was written in the wake of Romanticism. Everybody thought that if they wrote about crying a lot and how much they missed their dead dog then that wouldn’t be a good poem. And the Modernists came along and said, “No, no, that’s terrible poetry. We don’t want to hear about your tears. Stop yer cryin. Dry your tears, shut up.” But in some ways that also became an over reaction to the point where you ended up with a lot of arid poems where no feelings were expressed. They were just word games and in a sense those are bad poems too.
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A good poem is one where all the emotion, the thought, and the technique are all working in harmony together. And that the poem—no matter how long it is—is a compact expression of thoughtful emotion. Somewhere in the poem there is a connection to somebody who has a head and somebody who has a heart. Somewhere in that poem, no matter how ornate it may be, no matter how intellectually challenging or difficult it may be, there should be somewhere in that poem the idea of a heart and the idea of a voice and a brain.What is most important in poetry?
One of the other problems of the modernist and the post-modernist era, with the exception of the Beats, is that nobody wants to read poetry out loud, especially in school. Why read it quiet? That is the death of poetry. You want to kill poetry? Keep reading it silently. That kills it. You want poetry to live? You gotta read it aloud because it’s meant to be read aloud.Good poems are the ones that you can read aloud. Bad poems are the ones that you can’t read aloud. I’m not talking about concrete poetry, I’m talking about poetry that you should read aloud but you can’t because it’s not constructed well enough to be read aloud. Poetry is oratory, it’s a rhetorical performance, nothing wrong with that. And when you put together an artful construction of words that you mean to have read aloud, you are moving in the direction of oratory and rhetoric. You’re moving in the direction of great speakers.
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You’re moving in the direction of the Gettysburg address and, “I have a dream,” and even Barack Obama back in 2008 on the campaign trail, he had some doozies of speeches. Wow. Made everybody cry they were so good. I wonder how well the current Prime Minister could recite a poem. Or recite lines of poetry. Or identify lines of poetry if they were thrown at him. I think that if we want to talk about death of poetry or decline of poetic consciousness, if there is such a thing, I would blame politicians. I would blame public speakers for not being steeped well enough in the history of rhetoric and oratory which is partly a history of poetry. You want to move the public to accept your point of view to accept your policies, to agree with your policies, you damn well better be able to speak some poetry to them. Because that’s what’s going to get them through the bad days. When you have a society of leaders who do not know poetry and cannot speak poetry, you have an impoverished society. You also have a less humane society.Yeah, Harper is a bit of a robot.
I mean I can go on and go on and go on but I really think that if you really want to talk about decline, it’s in the educated ability of our leaders to speak to us in compelling terms. Not in the terms, “Roll up the rim,” or in the terms of, “I’m gonna go see the hockey game,” not to say there isn’t poetry in hockey and there isn’t poetry in coffee and donuts, of course there is, but what I am trying to say is that sometimes you gotta elevate your speech a little bit. I mean elevate it in terms of trying to frame it in eternal terms, which are the terms of poetry. Every good poem wants to last forever, that’s the game. You want to talk about a good poem? A good poem is trying to last forever. It wants to be read by your grandchildren, your great-grandchildren, it wants to be read in all different kinds of languages too. That’s what a good poem wants, a good poem wants to be around when you’re not around anymore. A bad poem is dead before you are.More readings on reading:Barf: “I Am My Own Betrayal”Scott McClanahan’s Animal MagnetismI Tripped With Allah and Wrote a Book About It